The Project Steering Group, chaired by Professor Geoff Rodgers the Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) at Brunel, met for the third time on Thursday 21st July. The minutes of the second meeting (Minutes_BPSG2) were agreed and, as agreed by the Group, are now being made public here.

Saulius Maskeliunas has very kindly agreed to allow us to share the photographs that he took during the recent euroCRIS Membership Meeting in Bologna. They bring back happy memories of a really useful meeting and a truly glorious city.

We recently welcomed a new member to the BRUCE project team. Patricia Donaghy has been seconded to the project from the Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC) at Brunel where she has worked for the past 13 years as a member of the support team.

Patricia’s main role in DISC is to provide staff and students with on-line systems that provide easy access to data (the perfect background for her work with BRUCE!) This involves extracting data from SITS (the Brunel student records system) and then managing this in SQL Server developing interfaces (web and application) to enable reporting / data entry (for academic and administrative staff) and information flows between staff and students.

Patricia will be working with Richard Jones and Dr Stephen Swift to develop the prototype BRUCE tool.

The BRUCE project aims to develop a prototype tool, based on CERIF, that will facilitate the analysis and reporting of research information from data sources that are already in use at the majority of HEIs.

What does that actually mean? HEIs already collect lots of information about the research that they do but that information tends to be stored in separate silos, e.g. the HR database, the institutional repository, student records, etc. The idea of BRUCE is to pull that data out of those silos, index it using CERIF and then create a new tool that can analyse and report on that data.

The project is funded by JISC under the Research Information Management strand of the Infrastructure for Education and Research Programme (JISC Grant Funding 15/10) and you can read the full project proposal on the JISC website.

We will use this blog to keep you up to date on our progress with the project which will run from February to July 2011.